seeker loves the darkness, seeker dresses in black. seeker writes poetry about death as a point of entry for understanding love. in seeker’s poetry, matters disintegrate. things fall apart. people forget who they are and do things so terrible they’ll never remember again. the abandoned selves in seeker’s poetry return to the earth: to be put to rest. to regenerate, reincarnate, flare up in the night with phoenix wings. the abandoned selves in seeker’s poetry emerge a new matter, strange to behold. off the page and off the map. in the unmapped places. in the places between. in those places we cannot anticipate, only navigate. only survive.

seeker fears such places, almost as much as she loves them. seeker loves the darkness so she dresses in black.

here is one story. here is one story told on the back of a pale boy’s hand. the subtle lift and loft of each minuscule bone, the tender rise and crackle of each joint. hands are all nuance and supposition, except when they are not. a theory of malleability. a theory of a pale boy’s hand. seeker sets upon a surface. she prepares to receive a new name for a previously unexamined matter.

seeker sleeps in the hallway outside of her room, but only when no one else is home. she does so believing that only through the acknowledgment that every residence is temporary may we glimpse what is eternal. on her bed, she puts flowers. a substantial tribute of flowers. stems and leaves and a flurry of petals fallen and recombined in abstract expressions of flowers that have fallen apart. stems and stamens and seed pods, what other flowers would seeker want? leaf matter, root matter, what’s the matter?

seeker is lying out her own wake. she dresses her second-to-last resting place, that place she will rest after she rests no more. seeker is no longer afraid of closing her eyes. she knows her every blink shatters the universe in some tiny way. she knows every unacknowledged end and beginning that quivers in the space hidden by every blink. the world that could exist in split hairs of not even seconds could be entirely different from the world that we hold our eyes open to, but we wouldn’t know it because our eyes are shut. what world exists in the split hairs of seconds, the places between?

forget it, the light is strange and the narrative unstable. instead, let us consider: why has seeker closed her eyes? she is tired and hungry. she wants to write poetry but fears it will never be read: by a dark girl, by a pale boy, by a woman dressed in fire or a man who lives in terror of a locked door. and yet what we have written is not something we can ever really read. and yet what we have written lines a reader’s understanding of us like adhesive contact paper at the bottom of the kitchen junk drawer. there’s so much more to it in every way in imagining. there’s so much more to it than any pale boy could know.

write the fire, write it fast, keep the language moving: seeker’s been burned by holding a line too long before. she gathers her treasures: roses and thorn bushes. books and marking ribbons. boxes shaped like hearts, agates cut into eggs. skulls and vertebra, a crumbling of leaves. a shell, a stone, a stick. a ring of keys. a diamond ring. a clasping ring of beads: black and blue, cobalt and turquoise, bleached-bone flecks of white. a stone with a hole worn through. a twisted lip of lotus stem. a red thread, a blue thread, a black thread. a pointed quartz included with tourmaline: seeker remembers every gift. broken wax seals and knotted thread cords. a dish filled with water. a small bottle of oil, another small bottle of oil. seeker loves the distilled essence of a single matter almost as much as the mysteries of combination. one energy into another, neroli absolute into lavender’s essence, clove spiking the bergamot.

intention augmented by other intentions. the unique signature of our personal desires: darkest blue, but only in glass or the very early morning. rose, but as red, darkest red, red as an expression of black, and that dark wine of fragrance hypnotizing the beloved. candles, beeswax and paraffin, carved with intention, etched by desire, dressed and redressed with blended oils, with holy oils, anointed in a line at the brow. seeker watches from the periphery that is her only home. she knows someone is waiting for her. she knows someone is calling for her. she knows someone somewhere is dreaming in darkness for her.

I really loved both of these, parts 1 and 2.I like the way you push the poetic structure just enough to make it uncommon and the language is so pretty and you have one of my favorite Japanese artists as an icon. What could be better? - ephemera illustrations.

there are three more seeker pieces, so far. the first two might be the strongest, but they've also been edited.

in the sixth grade we'd done a project where we designed a tour guide, complete with maps and promotional copy, for our fantasy world. my fantasy world was basically japan, with ball pits, because eleven. my teacher brought in this amazing book of woodblock prints for me to look at that i of course did not write down the title of. the mt. fuji series was highlighted; i saw "great wave off kanagawa" and thought, oh look! it is a picture of my emotions. as such i have consistently had a print of it somewhere in the vicinity. someone gave me a t-shirt of it in college, even, though i haven't seen it in years.

i'm pretty freaking happy about how the ephemera illustration came out. but it kinda raised the bar on the next one...

God, my little puke of a sixth grade life does not stack up to yours. I got a ribbon for a relay race on Field Day and I think that might be the pinnacle for me. "picture of my emotions" that is magical , you must have been a precocious youngster.

the precociousest. i think i got a ribbon for field day also, though who knows for what. perhaps freeform emoting.

yeah, some of it constitutes the first things i used as altar objects and so have ties to spirit guides that i've worked with the longest. the pocket watch was from my paternal grandfather, who had a home business fixing clocks and watches. this was among the abandoned inventory. keys are mostly from maternal grandmother, but the one on top is the twin of a key i used to wear but lost (possibly stolen in service of the world's most psychologically traumatizing scavenger hunt). this one is the key to the handcarved secretary desk i inherited in 2005, from my paternal grandmother. sticks, gray hair, and vertebra all provided by nature.